There’s no reason to think that we will be able to trust election results from red states and battleground states in the future.

But the story of voter suppression and distorting the will of the people is old. Certainly, the United States denied the right of blacks and women to vote for more than a century but let’s just even look at recent history. Our generation has been especially passive, acquiescing to obvious injustices.

One result of our acquiescence was President Bush’s $2 trillion quagmire in Iraq, “expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest” and untold human suffering. Meanwhile, the U.S. struggles with infrastructure, education and healthcare costs domestically.

Still, many people don’t know or remember that Republican tactics in the 2004 election led to an similarly questionable outcome.

The 2004 Election: Bush v. Kerry

In 2004, the electoral college margin was determined by Ohio’s 20 electoral votes, a state Bush won by 118, 601 votes over John Kerry.

While that seems like a reasonable margin, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell did everything he could to disrupt voter registration and voter access, targeting minority voters and districts likely to turn out for Kerry.

Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. – Common Dreams

One result of the 2004 election was Bush’s lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court of right wing corporatist justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Our failure to fight for election audits in Ohio has resulted in an ongoing generation of injustices.

The Impact of Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is the process of mapping state electoral districts in ways that optimize the number of safe seats for the majority party.

As reported by FairVote, in 2012, Barack Obama won 52% of the national two-party vote, but he only carried 22% of counties. While about 52% of voters wanted a Democratic House and Democratic candidates won more than a million more votes, Republicans won a comfortable majority of seats in the House of Representatives.

Gerrymandering has also nearly eliminated statesmanship and compromise because as unrestricted campaign finance positions party loyalists in safe seats around the country, there is simply no need to compromise.

With stronger resistance to the 2004 election results, we might have more campaign finance regulation and a completely different political environment. Instead, we have Trump and a Republican dominated Congress.

We Can’t Wait for Elections

Free, fair and verifiable elections require a robust democracy and state and federal governments that honor transparency, accountability and a regard for scientific fact.

Some will argue we have never had a true democracy in the United States because of our history of slavery, discrimination or the electoral college’s detachment from the popular will. But, until recently we were moving towards a stable republic that generally represented the choice of the people. This is no longer true.

Relying on elections and the path we are on under Trump and this GOP controlled Congress, Trump’s fraudulent “re-election” is a foregone conclusion. To expect anything different is delusional.

We’ve been relatively passive about voting rights and elections for too long. Great damage has been done. We can’t just wait for future elections to stop Trump and the Republican party. They will never implement unified democracy reforms and a Voter Bill of Rights is needed.

Instead, we need to accelerate efforts to seek out our levers of power, the power in Blue States, women and our popular majority. We’ll write more not this soon.